Short and reliable path selection for automatic evacuation guiding based on interactions between evacuees and their mobile devices

Abstract

When large-scale disasters occur, evacuees have to evacuate to a refuge quickly. For this purpose, there has been proposed an automatic evacuation guiding scheme based on implicit interactions among evacuees, their mobile devices, and networks. In this scheme, an evacuation route is obtained as the shortest path, which may not be safe. In this paper, we propose a short and reliable path selection for existing automatic evacuation guiding, which allows evacuees to evacuate quickly while avoiding encounters with blocked road segments as much as possible. First, the proposed scheme calculates k-shortest (k≥ 1) paths from the current location to the destination, with the help of the existing algorithm. Then, it selects the most reliable one from the candidates by taking into account road blockage probabilities, each of which is an estimated probability that the corresponding road is blocked under a certain disaster. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed scheme can reduce the number of encounters with blocked road segments with an appropriate value of k, while keeping the average/maximum evacuation time compared with the shortest path selection.